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Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

Using Apple's definition of a retina display, the MacBook Pros are already very close: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/01/retina-display-macs-ipads-and...

You hold your laptop significantly farther from your face than an iPad, thus a lower PPI is sufficient. However, a 9.7" display with the iPad's PPI is getting close to acceptable sizes for small laptops, like the 13" MacBook Pros.

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But the other thing is quality. Viewing angles and color gamut tends to be horrible on laptops. Not so on the iPad.

There was a single plant which made big laptop IPS panels (15-17") which got shut down; they were used in IBM FlexView on the Lenovos up to the T60p (2006). IPS is still rare between iPad size and small high-end monitor size (20").

I'm still sad that even the MBP 17 comes with a 6-bit PVA panel. It's a nice panel, but dramatically inferior to an 8 or 10 bit IPS.

My ThinkPad has the same resolution as the new iPad -- 2048x1536. I'm thinking of upgrading it to an iPad if it ever runs Linux...

The MBP comes with TN, not PVA. PVA is actually a fairly good technology. S-PVA has the darkest blacks of all panels, but is really really slow. You can see the ghosting when the camera pans in a movie.

Ah. From what I've read now, only some models of the Lenovo X200t ever shipped with PVA in a laptop (some were IPS, some were PVA). I guess different qualities of TN make a difference.

It all makes the IPS panels in the iPads even more impressive. From what I've read the IPS panel yield goes down with DPI, too, so the panel in the iPad (Early 2012) is amazing.

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